Kim Jong-un Acts Out Again

Unlike many maniacal leaders in history, Kim Jong-un does not appear to have a long-term strategy.

Photograph by Ed Jones/AFP/Getty

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un has a reputation as a dangerously erratic young man, who is purging his military and testing new missiles to transport the nation’s nuclear weapons. So it was not entirely surprising when, the day before United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was to make an unprecedented goodwill visit to North Korea, his host cancelled the event without explanation. Ban was to have visited the Kaesong Industrial facility, a sprawling South Korea-leased manufacturing site just inside North Korea, where North Korean nationals work for South Korean companies.

The Secretary-General was in Seoul to hold regional talks with South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and to speak at conferences. I was part of a group of a dozen reporters who had been invited to join Ban in North Korea, and was with the Secretary-General soon after he got the news. He was visibly dismayed. “We would have shown North-South coöperation,” Ban told me, in the lobby of his hotel, a half hour before making a formal announcement of the reversal.

“North Korea is very unstable; its leadership is unstable,” the South Korean Ambassador to the United Nations, Oh Joon, who is travelling with the Secretary-General, said. “It is the North Korea dilemma: if he saves his country, he may lose power.” For all its growing nuclear capability, North Korea is suffering economically, in stark contrast to its southern neighbor.

The Secretary-General’s visit to Seoul overlapped with that of Secretary of State John Kerry, although the two did not meet. Kerry travelled there on Sunday, soon after the North claimed that it had tested a new submarine-launched ballistic missile, in order to reassure South Korea that the United States would defend it against an attack. Kerry also harshly criticized the North’s defiance on nuclear issues, its human-rights record, and its cyber attacks. North Korea’s response to Kerry’s comments was swift, claiming they were “reckless.”

The two high-profile trips show how intense the interest has become in bringing North Korea into the international community. Ban, who was previously South Korea’s foreign minister, has made a point during his tenure as Secretary-General of finding openings to negotiate with North Korea; he has offered to go to Pyongyang, and he has met with North Korean leaders in New York.

The trip to the North was to be a small step. “The arrangements were all made and clearances received from North Korea,” Stéphane Dujarric, the Secretary-General’s spokesman, told me. “Then came the call with the reversal,” without any official explanation.

“It was very regrettable that D.P.R.K. authorities cancelled my visit to Kaesong Industrial Complex at the last minute,” the Secretary-General told me on Thursday. “We had taken all proper procedures with the D.P.R.K. authorities, and we were even discussing the size of the delegation and an advance team, so it was all very sudden that they cancelled.”

Late last year, North Korean diplomats tried, but failed, to block a vote in a key committee of the United Nations General Assembly, which urged the Security Council to refer leaders of the government to the International Criminal Court for prosecution for crimes against humanity and, last month, North Korean diplomats disrupted a U.N. event featuring national defectors. But even these incidents don’t explain why the trip was planned and negotiated, and then cancelled.

North Korea may be increasing its nuclear arsenal from a dozen to twenty weapons and could have as many as a hundred by 2020, the New York Times has reported, citing recent research. They are also testing ballistic missiles regularly. The fear is not so much that they will attack the South as that they will suffer an economic collapse and sell their technology to terrorists, as Graham Allison, the director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, has argued in the Times and elsewhere. North Korea’s recent cyber attacks on Sony and South Korea have added to the tension.

Unlike many maniacal leaders in history, Kim Jong-un does not appear to have a long-term strategy. As one Security Council diplomat, who requested anonymity, put it, “If you come home to a crazed five-year-old with Dad’s gun, what do you do?”

While President Obama is trying to get Iran in line on nonproliferation, there is little that his Administration seems to be able to do to influence Kim. Secretary of State John Kerry tested the waters during his recent travels, saying that the North should “take a lesson” from the Iran talks.

All signs, however, indicate that North Korea is not likely to give up its nuclear weapons any time soon. The Hong Kong-based documentary filmmaker Shum Fei Fung, who produced a series on North Korea, has spoken to several North Korean officials. Shum said that they look at Libya and say, “See what you get if you give up your nuclear arsenal.”

Columbia University’s Sue Mi Terry, writing in Foreign Affairs, advocates for a single, democratic Korea. Reunification, she says, would involve one of three scenarios: North Korea adopts the Chinese strategy of opening its economy, stopping its militarism, and bettering ties with Seoul; North Korea collapses and is absorbed by South Korea; or the two Koreas are unified after military conflict. Reunification—the hope, at least, of older generations in South Korea—would come at a cost of well over the earlier estimates of five hundred billion dollars, according to the Web site of the Unification Ministry of South Korea, and perhaps over a trillion dollars, according to a Reuters analysis of outsourced studies.

Behind the scenes, former and current U.S. officials have been discussing holding talks about how to resume negotiations with the North. Stephen Bosworth, the former United States Special Representative for North Korea Policy, and Joseph DeTrani, the former U.S. Special Envoy for Negotiations with North Korea, recently met with Ri Yong-ho, North Korea’s vice-foreign minister. Afterward, the Associated Press quoted Ri blaming the U.S. and South Korea for the strain in relations: “The root cause that aggravates the tension on the Korean Peninsula is none other than the large-scale joint military exercise between U.S. and South Korea, which is being held annually.” It was just another reminder how opaque—and scary—a hermit, rogue state with an erratic leader and nuclear weapons is to global security.

Pamela S. Falk is a reporter for CBS News based at the United Nations, and a professor of international law at Hunter College.